


Decompression Stops

by cheerynoir



Series: Drowning!verse [11]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: (or at least the beginnings of it), Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Asha is Bad At Emotions (it's a family thing), Codependency, Cuddling & Snuggling, Dagmer for Best Father Figure 2KFOREVER, F/M, Gen, Hospitalization, Hospitals, Injury Recovery, M/M, Medication, Multi, Nightmares, POV Second Person, Platonic Cuddling, Present Tense, Psychological Trauma, Ramsay is his own warning, Recovery, Reunions, Robb Stark is a Gift, Sharing a Bed, Steven Universe References, because apparently that's a Thing Theyne are into now, god damn someone give literally everyone a hug, slightly more healthy coping mechanisms, theon and jeyne are co-dependency buddies, turns out people care when you show up after six months - theon's surprised to say the least
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-11
Updated: 2016-06-11
Packaged: 2018-07-14 09:18:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,810
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7165241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cheerynoir/pseuds/cheerynoir
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>February 2016</i>
</p><p>Theon's memory flickers like a television full of static -- <i> full of snow</i> -- but this is the one thing he remembers:<br/>He is out. So is Jeyne. <br/>They're free.<br/>(That's all that matters)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Decompression Stops

These are the things you don’t remember:

• The ride to the hospital.

• The rush of doctors and nurses, crowding and talking and grabbing. The way you scrambled away from them as much as you could.

• The too-bright lights and the way you doubled over to coughing as soon as you were through the door, bloody-mouthed and drowning on dry land.

• The fact that you nearly took out a doctor's eye when he dragged Jeyne's hand from yours; the way you screamed yourself hoarse until she clawed her way back to you. 

 

These are the things you remember, hazy and disjointed:

• The press of too many pairs of hands on your cold skin, each burning like a brand.

• The murmur of voices overlapping, washing over you in a confusing blur of half-remembered words.

• Waking up tied to a bed and apologizing, over and over, for a rule you didn’t know you broke, trying to stave off a punishment you knew was coming; tears dribbling from your eyes to collect in the hollows of your ears.

• The low buzz of electric clippers and the murmured exclamations about matting and lice and fleas.

• Waking up and thinking you are in the basement

• Waking up warm

• Waking up and thinking you are dead

 

You come back to yourself in a white room. Something is beeping, spiking and thready. You are not shivering. The world is hazy at the edges, blunt and soft like the spine of the book of poems you carried from foster-home to foster-home until it fell apart. You feel like you are drifting, caught up in clouds or high-tide.

You look around, and the action does not hurt. The beeping slows.

The room is dim, but you can make out the handles of the bed you’re in, and your wrists in padded restraints. The sight relaxes you a little. You breathing comes a little easier, thick and slow in your chest.

Ramsay would never use padding.

Jeyne sleeps in the bed beside yours. There is a flush in her face, and her hair has been shaved down to nothing. Her skull presses against her weirwood-pale skin like something vulnerable. The tip of her nose is black.

You let out a slow sigh. It feels like there’s a monster sitting on your chest. It hurts to breathe, but it is nothing compared to the basement, the knife, the cold. You blink and it takes a year to open your eyes again.

There’s a woman in the room when your eyelids lift. You didn’t hear her enter, but she wears a loose pair of green scrubs, and consults a chart by the light from the hall, standing at the foot of Jeyne’s bed. Her profile is sharp and stern as a scalpel.

You open your mouth, but all that comes out is a croak. Your throat is a desert, a desecration, a graveyard.

_Please._

She startles all the same, glancing at you. She tries to smile. You mimic her. Your mouth hurts, in a distant, unimportant way.

You drift off again before her whispered question registers.

The storm batters the windows, wind howling like a pack of wolves hunting.

#

“Is he awake? Theon Greyjoy, is he conscious? I need to see him.”

“I’m sorry who-”

“His sister. You called me. Is he okay-”

#

“Where is my daughter? My Jeyne, where-”

“Sir, you can’t-”

“ _Get out of my way._ ”

#

“-told, Ms. Greyjoy, Mr. Harlaw, the damage isn’t as extensive as it could be. Malnutrition, pneumonia in both lungs, a touch of hypothermia, broken ribs and bruising from the vehicle… now the mutilation, amputation, and the extent of the scarring…”

#

“What do you mean I can’t see him? I’m his emergency contact! You have to let me see him. He’s my best friend, can’t you just _let me in_ for a minute-”

#

When the tide washes you ashore again, the room is full of sunlight. You breathe deeply, slowly, and your mind sharpens.

The girl with the ruined face is sitting beside Jeyne’s bed, head bowed, reading aloud. Jeyne – awake and sitting up – looks calm, though she does not smile.

A throat clears.

Your gaze re-focuses, and you tense.

The man in the hat offers you a smile and a cup of water with a straw. He helps you sit up enough to drink it.

“Your sister asked me to sit with you. She’s getting coffee,” he says. He’s not wearing his hat now, just a heavy grey sweater and jeans. “Your uncle is here too.”

“…which uncle?” you ask. Your voice is a low, alien thing. Your stomach churns, and you pick at the bed-spread. Your hands are free, the wrists unmarked fingers re-broken and splinted straight. There’s an IV in your right arm. You fight the urge to fuss with it. It’s cold, whatever they’re pumping into you.

Was it your one-eyed uncle, the star of so many childhood nightmares, blue-lipped and smiling? Was it the one who led the beach-side cult? Had they let the wife-killer out of prison for a visit?

“Rodrik, I think his name was,” says the man in the hat.

You let out a breath you didn’t know you were holding. “The reader,” you mumble.

You shake off the man in the hat’s raised eyebrow.

“I’m Theon,” you say, for lack of anything better. “Sorry I wrecked your car.”

“You didn’t do anything the storm wouldn’t have, lad,” says the man. He rubs the back of his neck. “Davos Seaworth. And that’s Shireen, with your friend.”

“Okay,” you say.

“Theon!”

You don’t think you will ever get tired of hearing your name. You turn as much as you can and there’s your sister in the door.

She is the same, and she is different. Echoes and shadows and could-have-would-have-beens tangle and refract. In August, Asha was dark-haired, dark-eyed, bold and smirking and absent.

Now, Asha is still dark-haired and dark-eyed, but her mouth is a thin, bloodless line and her hands are weathered, palms cracked, fingers picked at. Her knuckles are bruised.

You wonder who she’s been punching.

She crosses the room in three strides, barely seeming to touch the ground. At least her stride is the same: long and quick and merciless.

Her eyes are black with a hurricane of emotion, over-bright, and it makes you uneasy. You look at her chin, at her left ear-lobe, at the tip of her hawkish nose. Looking into Ramsay’s eyes meant nothing good, it’s hard not to apply the same lessons here.

“Asha,” you say. Some of the tension drains out of your spine like spring run-off, ice melting away. You cut your tongue on the jagged remains of your teeth, but it feels good to say her name, place her neatly in the here-and-now. “Hi.”

“Is that all you can say?” she asks thickly. The anger in her tone makes you cringe, even if her voice is rough around the edges, cracked like frost on a windowpane. “Six months and that’s it, you just – ‘hi’?”

“…It’s February?” you ask after some quick mental math. “I didn’t know.”

She sucks in a breath like you hit her in the stomach. You drop your gaze and chew the inside of your lip, shoulders hunched and spine curled. Her mouth opens and you brace yourself for the lash of her tongue, salt water on open cuts.

But there is a hand on her shoulder and a gruff, gentle voice:

“Asha. Let’s give him some breathing room, huh?” Nuncle Rodrik – Rodrik the Reader, the only Greyjoy to go to college, even if he was a Harlaw – eyes you steadily, and his face creases into a smile. “Hello, nephew. How’re you feeling?”

_Compared to what?_

“Better,” you say. It’s not a lie, exactly.

Half-truths and full lies and shallow, aching breaths: that is how the conversation goes. You don’t remember what you said after they leave, when you and Jeyne are alone in the sick-room. You reach out without thinking, and she laces your fingers together in the empty space between your beds.

“Is it weird to be weird around them?” you ask her, watching as she rubs at the tip of her nose with absent fingers. You hear footsteps, the far-off sound of her father talking to the men and women at the nurses’ station.

“I think it’d be weirder if you weren’t,” she replies. You let out a breath you didn’t realize you were holding. She squeezes your hand, and tries to smile.

It’s enough, for now.

#

Eddard Stark steps through the open door with a brisk knock, dressed head to heel in blue. You’ve been in the hospital for four sleeps, you think, and your gaze flicks to Jeyne, and the window, full of snow that’s still falling, and the door. Jeyne dozes.

Passing time in sleeps doesn’t work as well now. There’s sunlight and drugs to confuse you. You swallow. It doesn’t hurt as much as it used to.

“Good morning,” he says. His shadow stretches long and dark across the tiled floor.

“Mr. Stark,” you say. You glance down at your tray: scrambled eggs and apple sauce and orange juice. Easy to chew foods. You set down your tiny plastic fork. Your teeth ache, your stomach cramps. “Hi.”

“I was hoping you could answer some questions, if that’s alright,” he goes on. “About everything that’s happened recently. Jeyne’s already given her statement, but-”

“Have you found Ramsay yet?”

Eddard grimaces, his beard nearly hides the motion. He doesn’t meet your eyes. “Not yet. We have eyes on the ports and airports, though. It won’t be long, even with the snow.”

“Good,” you say. You lean back in your pillows a little, fingers twitching, splints and all.

“May I…?”

He gestures a little, and it takes you a moment to realize that he’s not just flapping his arm.

“Sure,” you say. There isn’t much else to say.

Mister Stark pulls up an uncomfortable hospital chair to your bedside and breaks out a pen and a little notepad. His eyes are distant and his face is impassive.

It’s a work-face, as much as your automatic smirk had been, back when you worked at Nuncle Cleftjaw’s bar.

You stare down at the covers and pick at your fingernails. Breathe deeply, and feel grateful the medication is working on clearing up the pneumonia that was drowning you on dry land.

“What do you want to know?” you ask, when the silence stretches.

The Chief of Police asks you question after patient question, his eyes steady on the side of your face. You stare at the wall. You count your heartbeats. 

You relive the last year, more or less, scars and all.

You tell him everything.

When you reach up to run nervous fingers over the familiar leather of your collar, you find only bare, goose-pimpled skin.

Panic drips down your spine like ice-water.

#

It’s dark when you wake up, drenched in sweat and breathing hard. You thrash and twist, sure Ramsay’s girls will rip into you, sure his knife is next, that he is so disappointed for misplacing your collar - _and who do you belong to, pet?_ \- that the cellar is a cage. There’s blood in your mouth. Your arms are pinned, your legs too, and you can hear a distant keening, an animal in pain.

_Someone kill it. It would be kinder. Someone, please-_

“Theon.”

“ _Theon!_ ”

You freeze.

The keening stops.

Your chest heaves and aches with every breath. 

_Oh. That’s me._

The hospital is cool and dim, the sounds muffled. Jeyne watches you, her eyes like ink in the gloom.

You stare at her, dry-mouthed. You’re trembling, a leaf in a hurricane, and can to nothing to stop it. Your face feels wet and hot.

“I thought,” you say. You voice breaks, and you do not go on. You wipe your tears with the heels of your shaking hands. “I thought he…”

“I know,” she says. “Me too.”

She clambers from bed in a tangle of linen, slow and steady and pained. You both lost toes to frostbite; you both lost pieces to the storm. The heart monitor flat-lines when she flicks the probe from the tip of her finger, but neither of you pay it much mind. She drags the IV pole with her, leaning on it hard.

She climbs into your narrow bed and hides her face in your neck. You run your fingers gently over her scalp – thinking of your own bald head - and hum tunelessly. This is not the nest, and Ramsay is not coming, and there are no dogs to lick and huff and pant.

But Jeyne is warm, sturdy and soft, and you hold her tightly. You are together, and you are safe.

You tell yourself these things, and you feel your heartbeat slow. You shift a little. Your legs tangle with Jeyne’s, like sticks rubbing together, and the sheets warm.

A team of nurses armed with a crash-cart and a fleet of impassive, intent expressions come crashing through the door. Your grip tightens a fraction and Jeyne starts to shiver.

“Let’s get you back to bed,” one says when it’s clear no one’s dying, and puts a hand on Jeyne’s back. Her entire body heaves like her skin wants to crawl off her bones and out the window. “Come on, pet, let’s get you-”

“Don’t!” your voice breaks, your throat tight.

_He isn’t Ramsay he isn’t Ramsay he isn’t-_

“I want to stay here!” screams Jeyne. The words are hot on your neck, her grip iron and steel. “Let me stay here, please!”

In the end, you do not look at them more than you have to. Someone hooks Jeyne back up to the heart monitor, adjusts your IVs and makes sure your stats are stable. They talk amongst themselves, and if they are irate, it does not seem to matter.

You drift off to sleep entangled, like slipping into a warm bath.

Morning comes too quickly.

#

The police come, Eddard Stark the first of many.

Rodrik comes, books and worn care in hand.

Davos and Shireen come, warm and steady.

Dagmer comes, red-eyed, and his mouth is as ruined as yours. The thought makes you smile a little, even if his touch makes you flinch.

He tells you he would have come sooner, but Asha hadn’t thought to approve anyone but herself and Rodrik for visiting rights. Too leery of the other uncles, or the press or – anything.

“She cares, even if she’s terrible at showing it,” he tells you.

“I know.”

_She nearly cried the first time she saw me,_ you do not reply. _I’d cry, too, looking at me._

It has been one week, two days, nine hours since the snowstorm, since your desperate flight. Sometimes it feels like a life-time.

But counting the days, the hours, it grounds you in the here and now so neatly. In the cellar, you never knew what day it way. Now, you know it is February 15th, 2016. It’s one PM. 

1:27 PM, you note, and feel a quiet hum of satisfaction. 

“Do you remember when you were six, and you fell off Nagga’s Bones?” Dagmer asks gruffly, out of no-where. 

That startles a laugh out of you, squeaky as a rusted hinge. You remembered the summers on Old Wyk, the crush of your family, whole and terrible, around you. Climbing up the arcs of ribs, over the bumps of the spine – it was the closest thing you had to fun on those trips. Your brothers thought it was stupid, baby-ish, and only scaled the ancient fossil to say they’d done it first, and better than you ever could.

“I didn’t fall, Rodrik pushed me,” you tell him. You grin a little, forgetting for a moment your teeth. “Maron talked him into it, I think.”

You put a hand over your mouth a moment later, mumbling apologies that Dagmer waves off. Asha does not like to look at your teeth. Eddard Stark does not like to look at you at all.

Only Jeyne seems content to study you, but you forgot for a moment – Dagmer isn’t Jeyne.

But the thunder-clouds in his expression ease. He pats your knee and winces when you flinch. “I’m not mad at you, lad,” he says, stormy. “It’s your brothers I’m wanting to strangle, dead or not.”

“Your mouth was a mess for months after that, landing on your face as you did,” he goes on, banishing old slights with a wave of his broad hand, “And it’s a mess now. I don’t see any reason it can’t be fixed, Shatterteeth.”

It’s an old, old nickname. Dagmer had used it affectionately in the aftermath, when eating hurt and smiling was shameful and there was no money to fix up your baby teeth.  
“As you say, Four-Lips,” you reply, and tip your head, echoing the long-forgotten script.

Your uncle’s laughter shakes through you like an earth-quake, a hurricane. A blizzard.

It’s … good.

#

It is seven o’clock in the evening.

No.

7:12.

The accuracy tickles you pink, and you grin a little into Jeyne’s shoulder.

“What?” she asks. She stares at the television with the quiet awe of someone who has gone without, her face bathed in the blue glow. On screen, a pointy woman named Pearl instructs a little brown girl – Connie? - in the art of sword-play. You’ve been drifting in and out, but the songs are catchy enough, the colours enough to keep your eye when you aren’t glancing at the watch Asha brought for you.

Around you, other patients of the ward gather, coughing or mumbling quiet conversations, playing cards or watching TV. The little common room is not quiet, or dark. You and Jeyne share a chair, curled tight around each other in a tangle of limbs and oversized clothes.

“It’s 7:12 – and forty-seven, no, eight seconds,” you tell her.

She smiles with one side of her mouth, leans her head back against your shoulder. She’s wearing a pink beanie to cover her scalp. The one you wear is black and gold, courtesy of Rodrik. “And it’s February 15th,” she replies. “Happy belated Valentine’s Day, Theon.”

“Yeah,” you say, and return her smile. “Same, Poole.”

You don’t need to count the days in sleeps and waking, or the sight of your injuries healing. You have a watch, and people to ask, and a calendar at the nurse’s station.  
It’s better than good.

#

“Theon?”

The episode has bled from the Pearl and Connie Show into something garish and loud, and your attention flicks away quick.

You stare.

Robb Stark stares back.

His hair is mussed and he hasn’t shaved in a few days, it looks like. He wears jeans and soaked sneakers and a red flannel that clashes with his hair, and he’s looking at you like you’re about to slam-

_A door on his hand, I told you not to touch your collar, pet_ –

The door in his face.

As if there was a door to slam.

“Robb,” you say. Jeyne is tense in your arms, watching you from the corner of her eye. 

You look at him, really look, even if you can’t meet his eyes. His lips are chapped and raw, his eyes hold oceans, and he holds himself like he’s ready to run. The shirt he’s wearing under his flannel is black and tight across his chest.

The boy who loved Robb Stark, the one who leaned on his shoulder, who ate with him, drank with him, who showed up on his doorstep after midnight, the boy who kissed him once, chaste and slow and sweet – that boy seems like someone else, now.

That boy was a life-time ago. That boy should by right be dead, lost under Ramsay’s knives, trapped in the cellar.

So why do you feel him stirring in your chest?

“Hi,” he says, thick and hoarse.

“Is that my shirt?” you ask.

He takes two steps toward you and falters. His hands twitch like he wants to reach out. He smiles like a knife wound, like he’s bleeding out and he doesn’t want you to worry. You can’t look away.

“Yeah,” he says. He rubs his mouth with an unsteady hand, and you remember how warm he was, once. “You. You left it – _before_.”

Jeyne untangles herself from you – stands in two pairs of wool socks and her biggest, comfiest hoodie that you’re pretty sure she stole from you.

“I’m, um, I’ll be back,” she says, stops talking, and pivots away. She slip-slides from the common area, and makes a sharp left. 

Probably to talk with the nurses, or score the good coffee instead of the swill the families need to drink.

You try to ignore the way panic knots up your throat.

Bad things happen when Jeyne is out of sight.

You look at Robb, and Robb looks back.

The silence stretches.

It’s so alien you bit back a smirk, nervous laughter bubbling in your throat like champagne. 

“You look good,” you say at last. And he does – rough around the edges, worn down in places, but better than you.

There are corpses that look better than you.

“You don’t,” he says. He looks at you like you’re the good china he broke when he was eleven and you were home alone, white and blue on the hard-wood floor. Like you’re broken and unfixable and he’s so, so sorry.

He wears guilt like a security blanket around his shoulders.

Your stomach turns.

You laugh. “Charmer.”

He pales, grey like old oatmeal. His eyes are very blue, suddenly, wide and worried. “Theon-”

Gods, you love the way he says your name.

“Kidding,” you say. And it’s old, this flippant dismissal, this minute shrug. Your body remembers even if you’re floundering in the back of your own mind, clawing for a script. You smile, and remember too late the horror of your shattered teeth.

Robb flinches a little, and you wish you could hate him for it.

“Come sit,” you say, because looking up at him hurts your neck.

He sits beside you, a second chair pulled up close. Your knees bump and he is warm warm warm. You watch him from the corner of your eye. 

He wears your shirt like he’s made it his own and watches you like you’re going to evaporate. He opens his mouth time and again, only to shut it.

He doesn’t touch you, but he reaches out and pulls back. Reaches out and pulls back.

You’re glad he doesn’t touch you. You think he might cry if you flinch away, and you don’t know how to deal with other people’s tears.

Half an hour ticks past, and you are an island of quiet in a sea of murmuring.

“I’m glad you’re back,” he says at last, fighting to keep him voice even.

You smile, closed-lipped, at your drawn-up knees.

“Me too.”

**Author's Note:**

> Well this happened a bit sooner than I was expecting. Thanks so much to Elisa and Morgan, for looking this overe and putting up with my pestering - and a special thanks to Morgan, for helping me with Robb, the tricky bastard he is.
> 
> Tell me what you think?
> 
> Come say hi on [tumblr](http://www.cheerynoir.tumblr.com/)!


End file.
